Group-work and collaborative learning activities are becoming a common part of most higher education classrooms. Group-work activities helps develop important collaborative, communication, negotiation and many other skills that are now starting to be recognised as essential for global workplaces and skills that future ready workforce should have. Unfortunately, some group-work activities are purely a reaction to the increasing numbers of students, rather than aiming to develop these skills. It’s no surprise than that most people involved in group-work activities don’t like it: educators find it hard to manage groups and students would rather do their own work than having to work with non-conforming students. In many cases international student tend to be at the receiving end of many of the criticisms around group-work: “the international students don’t do any work”, “the international students have bad English, so I have to do all the work”, “I am happy to do all the work myself” … etc. etc. In my own experience, the international students often are eager to engage in group-work, particularly with domestic students as it gives them an opportunity to “make friends” and “improve their English”. This is not surprising given the vast majority of International students we get in Australia are from collectivist cultural backgrounds. So what can we do to maximise the benefits of group-work activities? It is important to design group-work activities properly: As mentioned earlier on, many educators use group-work activities purely to address workload issues. This, I believe, will lead to problems. Group-work activities need to reflect the skills that you want your students do. In many cases this should also include reviewing the learning outcomes to see where the group-work activities fit. This will also help align the group-work activities to group-work assessments. One of the most important aspect of group-work activities is that it must be complex enough to require a number of people to solve it: ‘if a group-work activity can be done by one person, than it will be done by one person’. Train students to work in groups: We often expect students to engage in group-work activities, without giving them appropriate training. If you are going to use group-work in your class, it is important to develop that right from the beginning. I have had students from many different countries in my classes, one of the first things I do is get them to get in groups with student from their own countries or speak the same language. Give them a simple problem which they discuss and share among themselves, and then with you. In subsequent classes you can make the problems more complex and move students around out of their original groups. Activities can also involve developing group-work project plans, and understanding what it means, developing responsible expectations for group-work activities. Design teams based on strengths: All students have something to offer. If you have been working with students on various group-work activities over a period of time, you should have a general idea about their strengths and weaknesses. Work with that. Try to form groups with different strengths and diverse skill set. Assess the process of working in groups: often we focus too much on the final outcome of a group activity, like the final report, presentation, etc. In order for group-work activities to work well, you need to demonstrate that students work like how they communicate, negotiate, problem solving, keeping on task, call out when someone is not on task, etc. should be rewarded in terms of marks. You need to give time in-class to monitor this work, provide feedback, and set expectations….make sure your group-work succeeds. You will be able to look at examples of some of these in some of the publications I have done previously: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/128328/1/AnandP-IADIS%202010.pdf https://eprints.qut.edu.au/128314/2/128314.pdf https://eprints.qut.edu.au/128327/1/LanceleyAnand-ISANA%202011.pdf https://eprints.qut.edu.au/128326/1/Anand_ICERI2012.pdf
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We have been thinking about internationalising the learning experience for a while. Most teachers tend to depend on the existence of international students in their classes to engage in any form of internationalisation experiences, personally I rejoice when I see students from as many diverse backgrounds in my class, however, most teachers don’t do internationalisation very well, and I would argue that most do it extremely poorly.
To internationalise the learning experience, a classroom does not necessarily need international students in them. To start to really engage in internationalisation initiatives, teachers need to change their own thinking, as teachers and academics, we need to re-think what we do? Why we do what we do? And more importantly how do we assess what we get our students to do in our classes? Most higher education educators tend to be over protective over what we do? A good example here is students’ inability to mix and match subjects from different institutions. Just putting internationalisation aside for a while, in order for higher education to remain relevant it needs to re-think everything we have done previously. For example, some of the disruptive trends like micro-credentials, badges, online, just in time qualifications, etc. will require higher education institutions re-think their approaches. In most cases these disruptive trends will require institutions to open up and engage with external entities. Now if we are serious about internationalising the learning experiences, we need to look at it in a similar way as many of the other disruptive trends, many of the future ready skills are indeed developed through internationalisation. We want students to interrogate concepts and ideas that are embedded in different cultural contexts, negotiate differences in values, language and expectations and develop solutions that are respectable and inclusive. These are high level skills that should be embedded in all curriculum that needs to remain relevant for the disruptions that higher education institutions are facing. Naturally understanding the importance of these skills, and how to develop and assess them is the hardest part. Think about group work, most academics use them but very few assess it effectively, and therefore the focus is lost on the important skills that is develop through that process. By opening up our courses we can identify problems that are located in different cultural contexts, perhaps in different geographical locations. Students can be required to identify and define those problems and develop solutions that is culturally sensitive to the location of the problem. Some of these approaches will require to lose some of the control that we tend to have on our courses. These processes develop important internationalisation skills, and therefore assessments regimes should focus more on the processes than the outcomes. It is extremely important to re-focus on exactly what we want to do when we internationalise the curriculum and be prepared to change our own thinking before we can try to change our students’ thinking. There has been a lot of interest in international education recently, and perhaps consequently, somewhat in internationalising of the curriculum. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, internationalising the curriculum is no longer an option, in order to appropriately prepare students for the future of work, it is imperative that the learning experiences that we design for our students includes significant opportunities to engage in globalised ideas, challenges and solutions.
For any teaching and learning initiatives to be effective, students need to engage in learning activities that help them transform their thinking, and ultimately their actions. This is the reason I like to focus on learning experiences, as everything comes down to what students’ experience, through learning activities including assessments. (In fact some of the most effective learning experiences are those that are embedded within assessments, but that is a topic for another time/blog!) So how do we internationalise the learning experience, and ensure that these experiences are transformative? Most educators embed international case studies, examples from different countries, etc. in their classes, which is great, however, in my own experience these approaches probably does not have the type of transformative results that we should be aiming for. Don’t get me wrong, these initiatives are absolutely welcome, but we should really be looking to do more. To be truly transformative these ideas should challenge students’ traditional thinking and doing things. Many teachers use group work in their classes, and if they have international students, create groups that mix international and domestic students in their groups, why? Well if you talk to many teachers they would not hesitate to suggest that the international students need help with their English so the domestic students help them out, perhaps this is true. How about rewarding the process of the group work rather than the actual output.( Rewarding effort, not the output!) That way a really great learning opportunity for the whole class could be to understand how different groups worked, regardless of the makeup of the group, and in some cases actually have groups that are not formed along nationality lines, but their strengths (https://www.16personalities.com/) . Some groups can have all international students. The process of getting students into groups can become a learning activity on its own. Get students to demonstrate and defend the process they used so that others can understand different ways of working. Remember that different people, from different cultures engage in group work very differently! If you are looking for some ideas about some of these transformative ideas, have a look at one of the papers that Byron Lui and I wrote (https://eprints.qut.edu.au/128314/) . |
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December 2019
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Photo used under Creative Commons from Philippe Put